Connected medical devices are transforming healthcare. Unfortunately, security is too often an afterthought for the clinical engineering and business technology (BT) management teams implementing these revolutionary new technologies. In a recent report, Forrester predicted that 2016 will be the year we see ransomware for a medical device or wearable. This is a delicate thought, considering: 1) the Healthcare Industry is actually behind on data security compared to other industries and 2) the FBI highlighted the risk posed to medical devices in their recent public service announcement: Internet Of Things Poses Opportunities For Cyber Crime.

This research initiative seeks to answer the following: Are there real threats posed by the emergence of connected medical devices? What can you do to protect your patients and employees from life threatening breaches? Is there an underground market for medical device exploits? This research will publish in early 2016 and will be featured in my talk at the RSA Conference this March.

We are looking for research interview candidates to support this initiative, specifically security professionals working in a healthcare setting or medical device security vendors with current solutions on the market. In exchange for your time, we will provide you with a complimentary copy of the final research. While anyone who participates will have the opportunity to be listed as an interviewee in the final report, all interviews will be treated as confidential unless expressly instructed otherwise.

The title hasn’t yet been put to client vote, but Chris Sherman may be the renaissance man of Forrester’s S&R team. As an analyst, Chris advises clients on data security across all endpoints, giving him a broad perspective on current security trends. His experience as a neuroscience researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital also gives him insight into the particular challenges that Forrester’s clients in the healthcare industry face. Lastly, when he hasn’t been writing about endpoint security strategy or studying neural synapse firings, Chris flies Cessna 172’s around New England. Listen to this week’s podcast to learn about recent themes in Chris’s client inquiries as well as the troubles facing a particular endpoint security technology.

By all accounts, we’re approaching a new order of integration between technology and medicine. Real-time medical diagnostic data obtained from our mobile phones will soon be integrated directly into our electronic medical records where clinicians can use the data to make more-accurate (and potentially dynamic) treatment plans. Hospital staff can communicate and react to changing patient conditions faster and with less disruption to the patient experience than ever before, thanks to increasingly integrated mobile messaging systems and other mobile applications (for both the patients and clinical staff).

Applying big data analytics to PHI promises to improve patient outcomes and lead to more efficient —and less costly — patient care. It’s hard not to feel a level of excitement as this convergence of healthcare, mobile technology, and big data progresses at an accelerated rate. However, with all of this new patient data being collected by insurance payers, medical providers, and third-party services, healthcare employee endpoints have become an especially vulnerable source of data loss.

■Healthcare records are five times as likely to be lost due to device theft/loss.¹ If you’re a CISO at a healthcare organization, endpoint data security must be a top priority in order to close this faucet of sensitive data. Consequences will increasingly be more than just a mere slap on the wrist with fines, as consumers fight back.

I take many briefings from these types of vendors (primarily the ones I cover in Forrester’s Endpoint Visibility and Control category) and within the first 5 minutes of the conversation, the vendor mentions that their solution has a “small footprint.” The use of this phrase is the equivalent of nails scratching their way across a chalkboard for me. When was the last time you heard anyone say that they have a “large footprint?” Please provide more information: Do you run in user or kernel land? What are the impacts to utilization? Even if a vendor truly has a “small footprint,” when that new agent is deployed to a host that already has four or five agents running, the collective footprint is far from small.

It's hard to believe that a company could burn through $225 MILLION dollars in 11 months, but it looks like that may have been exactly what AirWatch did. According to data released by AirWatch and written by financial analysts (links to all data sources at bottom of post), AirWatch likely had burned through nearly all of its available cash in record time. Based on an assumption of $120K burn per employee (fully loaded) per year and an assumed removal of $50M in equity at the time of the venture round, AirWatch would have had somewhere between 5 and 6 months of runway left as of January 2014. These assumptions are corroborated by the fact that VMware has contractually extended AirWatch an offer to provide a bridge loan if the acquisition deal does not close in the next 6 months.

What did AirWatch do wrong? It sounds like they may have made some over-assumptions with regards to their growth rates for 2013. It could have possibly been the adoption rates in countries outside of North America. It may have just been bad luck. Or it could even be a cooling off of interest in mobile device management technologies based on containerization. We won't know exactly why they were getting near the end of the runway, but what we can say is that VMware may have overpaid in multiple. Based on the data provided by VMware of AirWatch bookings for 2013, VMware paid somewhere around 16x bookings for AirWatch. Man, that's a lot of bread!

On January 22, 2014, a new mobile security player was born. This is the date that VMware announced its intention to purchase the mobile device management (MDM) firm AirWatch. With a price tag of $1.5 billion, this acquisition confirms that the mobile security market is scorchingly hot. This news comes on the heels of the November acquisition of Fiberlink by IBM. I expect additional mobile security market consolidation to occur throughout the remainder of 2014. This acquisition is a shot across the bow of any other major vendor looking to play in the mobile security market. If you don't step up and spend now, you might just be left holding the bag.

Does your organization have a significant number of endpoints still running Windows XP? Don’t worry, you’re not alone: Forrester's Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2013 shows that the average organization still has 20% of their employee endpoints running XP. Considering that most organizations spend 18 to 32 months when migrating to newer versions of Windows, many organizations will likely find themselves scrambling to batten down the hatches before Microsoft’s April 8, 2014 end-of-life deadline.

After this date, Microsoft will stop releasing security patches for the 13-year-old operating system, a terrifying situation for organizations still relying on XP. What can you do as an organization if you still have a substantial XP presence within your environment? You can:

Migrate to Windows 7 or 8 posthaste. Microsoft has come a long way in preventing certain classes of attacks, such as bootkit and rootkit attacks. In fact, Microsoft has told us that Windows XP is 21 times more likely to get infected with malware than Windows 8.1. To help our clients understand the pros and cons of Windows 8.1 security, I recently published a guide on this very topic.

Buy some extra time. For those that can afford it, Microsoft will offer “custom support” in the form of XP security patches past the April 8 deadline. I’ve spoken with a number of organizations that determined that it would be cheaper to pay this premium than to migrate away from XP. Of course, this is just prolonging the inevitable; custom support will not be available forever.

Understanding the terms and technologies in the mobile security market can be a daunting and difficult task. The mobile ecosystem is changing at a very rapid pace, causing vendors to pivot their product direction to meet the needs of the enterprise. These changes in direction are creating a merging and twisting of technology descriptions being used by sales and marketing of the vendor offerings. What we considered “Mobile Device Management” yesterday has taken on shades of containerization and virtualization today.

Mobile antivirus used to be a standalone vision but has rapidly become a piece of the mobile endpoint security market. Where do we draw the lines, and how do we clearly define the market and products that the enterprise requires to secure their mobile environment?

In an attempt to help the enterprise S&R professional understand the overlapping descriptions of mobile security products, I am working on new research that will help organize and quantify the market. Understanding the detailed state of each of the technology offerings in the market, and their potential impact on a five- to 10-year horizon, will help enterprises make more-educated purchasing decisions.

To begin the process of covering all of the technologies being offered today, I’ve divided the solutions in the space by technology type. Not only am I analyzing technologies that are available now, but I’m also researching any additional products, services, and vendors in the mobile security space that have innovative new concepts that they are bringing to bear. These new-age offerings will help shape the future of mobile security, and we need to get ahead of the concepts now if we wish to have a better understanding of the impact of the innovation.

You are now no doubt aware that Boston-based security firm Bit9 suffered an alarming compromise, which resulted in attackers gaining access to code-signing certificates that were then used to sign malicious software. See Brian Kreb’s article for more details. (Symantec breathes a quiet sigh of relief to see a different security vendor in the headlines.)

The embarrassing breach comes at a time when the company has been seen as one of the security vendor landscape’s rising stars. Bit9 has actually been around for more than a decade, but the rise of targeted attacks and advanced malware has resulted in significant interest in Bit9’s technology. In late July, Bit9 secured $34.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. Bit9’s future was bright.

On Friday afternoon, Bit9 CEO Patrick Morley published a blog providing some initial details on the breach. A few of his comments stood out: “Due to an operational oversight within Bit9, we failed to install our own product on a handful of computers within our network … We simply did not follow the best practices we recommend to our customers by making certain our product was on all physical and virtual machines within Bit9."